FEATURING - Cultural landscape heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa edited by John Beardsley.

The Special Collections Book of the Week this week is:

Cultural landscape heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa edited by John Beardsley.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth. Scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to spaces created by and for Africans themselves, from the precolonial era to the present. This book is a contribution to a small but growing effort to address this oversight. Its essays present a range of landscapes: pathways and cairns used by nomadic peoples to navigate through and mark significant places; anthropogenic or managed forests consecrated to ritual purposes of various kinds; tombs or palaces with significant landscape orientations and components; even monumental ceremonial and urban spaces, as at Great Zimbabwe or Djenne. They explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous designed landscapes, how these landscapes were understood in the colonial era, and how they are being recuperated today for nation building, identity formation, and cultural affirmation. Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today, from the conflicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection to the competition between local and international heritage agendas.

Catalogue Access: https://univofpretoria.on.worldcat.org/oclc/908698958

This book is available at Special Collections, housed on level 5 of the Merensky 2 Library, and is part of our Tukkiana (TUK) Collection.

The Special Collections unit of the Department of Library Services plays a stewardship role in the acquisition and preservation of the Library's rare and valuable information resources, making them accessible to students, staff and researchers, as well as safeguarding them for future generations.